Thursday, 2 May 2013

Google Googles stops taking the long way but keeps making noise

Google Googles is a great picture identifier, a good text and business card scanner, a useful translation app, a quick'n'dirty barcode scanner, sudoku solver, and a few things more.

But it has two things going against it.

A couple of updates ago Goggles got a start screen with picture shooting as an option. That extra screen meant you couldn't shoot pictures straight after opening the app anymore. The last update removed the extra screen, so you can start shooting without delay. Just like you could do with the very old versions of the app.

They didn't fix second flaw yet. When you shoot a picture and send it to Google, the Goggles app spits out a very loud and annoying beep. There's no way to switch it off, short of decompiling the APK and hunting down the code that generates that horrible beeping noise. Even if you put your phone in silent mode Goggles keeps screaming.

Time for Google to ditch the beep. While they're working on the app anyway, they can integrate it with their other Android search apps. Search, voice search, gesture search, and Goggles all in a single super search app, why didn't Google make this already?